More To Be Said

Submitted by Yisrael Medad (Israel), Jun 20, 2006 at 15:09

Telegraphically, one other date is surely the 1996 Hasmonean Tunnel incident that, beyond the violence and the near-capitulation of the Netanyahu gov't (thus undermining the effectiveness of a right-wing supposedly nationalist cabinet), successfully implanted the "exchange of history" maneuver described in your article more than done in the first years after 1967 through UNESCO and the archeological diggings then.

Second point: that from a diplomatic confrontational aspect, just when Israel needed to strengthen its claim to Jerusalem and specifically, the Temple Mount, the gov't, the police and the High Court of Justice continued to impede any recognizable Jewish presence on the Temple Mount even without any religious trappings but simply as Jews and not as lack-of-identity "tourists". This led to a connected fault: the impotence vis-a-vis the building of additional underground mosques and the emptying out off the Mount of material that enough laws (Antiquities, etc.) could have halted.

As I noted in a monograph (http://www.acpr.org.il/ENGLISH-NATIV/06-issue/medad-6.htm), the Temple Mount is a "flashpoint" but Israel seems not to know how to employ it, restrain it and modify it as an instrument of policy.

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